


Stay

by shittershutter



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 08:50:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13714215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shittershutter/pseuds/shittershutter
Summary: And through it all, Tommy is the first person in years who doesn’t interrogate him. The absence of questions is so deafening. The boy has all the right to ask after letting him inside his home and later inside his body — and Tommy does talk, sometimes directly to him, but often *around* him, like a radio would — but inquiring what Gibson wants for breakfast is the absolute pinnacle of his pry.





	Stay

**Author's Note:**

> Thought I'd write something from Gibson's perspective. Because Gibson is love.
> 
> It's long and unbetad so it's going to be traumatic. Be prepared.

“I missed you,” is the first thing Tommy says to him when they are alone. 

Gibson just stands there, in the middle of the kitchen, the small bag of his belongings at the feet. Tommy’s apartment is so tiny the younger man can’t come any closer without brushing against him — and if there is something adamantly clear about Gibson’s mysterious condition, it’s that the physical contact is not something he’s particularly thrilled about. 

Gibson hides his trembling hands in his pockets, embarrassed, even though he somehow can tell that Tommy won't judge him for that. Given how one of his own is concealed in the sleeve of an oversized coat like there is something very wrong with it and Tommy isn't prepared to show what exactly. 

He doesn't realize he can look the boy in the eye, not immediately, not until the absence of tension in his neck registers with the brain because his head is straight for a change and he is drowning in the eyes of the boy he recognizes. 

He calls him “boy” in his head the moment he sees him there on the beach, looking like every younger brother his every friend ever had.

Tommy, his name is Tommy, “Thomas J.” according to the dog tags Gibson wears like they are his own through the camp, the hospital and now through this uncomfortable scene between the cupboard and the kitchen table. 

He nods weakly to show the understanding of what is being said. Also, in agreement. 

After the water takes him, dark, salty and dense, burning through the lungs and dragging him down, his voice goes away and takes all the sense of who he used to be with it. 

He has a modest collection of memories left, faces, places, and names — the usual simple, banal things. And the most vivid of them all is the physical feeling of the feverishly hot body lying on the beach next to him, contrasting so sharply with the wet uniforms they’re stuck in. 

Gibson spends years in camp falling in and out of pneumonia like the Dunkirk water wants to have him back, wants its debt paid. On his worst nights when he sleeps sitting up to fight the feeling of drowning as his burning lungs enclosed with broken ribs gurgle, he can feel the warmth of that body next to him. 

He should have died for a million times but staring in the eyes of the boy in front of him makes him see the value in the fact that he haven't. 

“Tommy,” the boy finally takes a shaky step forward stretching his hand out. 

Gibson takes that hand in his, now noticing how sweaty his own skin is in comparison and nods enthusiastically. 

*I know, I remember your name. It’s the one of a very few that I do. *

“Let us take your coat off,” Tommy takes another step, the one that is too much. Gibson jumps out of reach and hits his head against the cupboard sending its contents into a loud rattle.

The boy raises his hands up, five fingers sticking out of his one sleeve, three from the other. “Your ribs,” he says with the steady voice like he’s trying to talk down a skittish horse. “You unbutton it; I’ll just take it off your shoulders.”

Letting him do just that, circling and coming at him from behind is probably the bravest thing Gibson does in months. But at least they both are smiling faintly when Tommy is done. 

The grimace hurts Gibson’s face, even this slight upturn of the corners of his mouth causes discomfort. Not as much as waving his hands around to take off the damn coat, though.

“You’ll have to sleep with me, I’m afraid,” Tommy tells him saving the old creaky bed for the last landmark of his apartment tour. It takes them fifteen steps total, that walk, maneuvering between the walls and the furniture and trying not to touch.

“You’re not sleeping on the floor, I sure as fuck am not either. And the sofa has a huge hole right in the middle. It’s for Alex when he stays over.” 

The name doesn’t ring a bell and Gibson doesn’t contest the terms of this new existence, modest as they are. He just nods, and Tommy nods right back.

* * * 

As their life together starts ticking by, they share their food, clothes, bed before they start sharing so much more than the bare necessities. 

And through it all, Tommy is the first person in years who doesn’t interrogate him. The absence of questions is so deafening. The boy has all the right to ask after letting him inside his home and later inside his body — and Tommy does talk, sometimes directly to him, but often *around* him, like a radio would — but inquiring what Gibson wants for breakfast is the absolute pinnacle of his pry. 

Gibson talks back to him in his head, thoughts whirling until the temples start to pulsate with the pain under the weight. In French at first but little by little the English mixes in, all of it with Tommy’s intonation, Tommy’s lexicon which Gibson steals for himself with no shame at all. 

Then he starts noticing himself opening his mouth and breathing in when the thoughts start racing like he is about to say something out loud. Like it’s almost there, ready to break out.

It's still without a sound yet but in this quiet Tommy creates around him, Gibson starts his journey back to himself.

* * * 

The uncomfortable topics are the hardest. 

“Did I…” Gibson starts carefully. He swallows loudly around the rest of the sentence that is now hopelessly stuck right above his Adam's apple and squeezes Tommy’s hip instead of trying to get it out. 

“I hate to break it to you, honey,” Tommy snorts. “But the absolute worst you can do to me with that thing,” he gestures in the general direction of Gibson’s softening cock, “comes nowhere near to s-mine’s full potential.”

Tommy takes a big gulp from the bottle, wincing, as Gibson studies the broken shape of him: the bony frame and the leg bent at such an unnatural angle it looks like it’s not even a part of him, it shouldn’t be. The ugly rough patches the shrapnel left behind run up from his calf, curl around the hip and dissolve into the flesh right above the jutting pelvic bone, a sharp contrast to his soft milky skin. 

“You didn’t hurt me, Gibson,” Tommy says, dead serious. “You couldn’t have even if you tried.”

Gibson huffs because his boy is a liar, a terrible one at that. He can measure his pain by how much Tommy drinks — and they pass the bottle back and forth but still, Tommy downs twice as much as Gibson does.

He jumps a little as the hand curls around his cock, rubbing in the sticky mess of it they haven’t bothered to clean up. It’s his good hand — he won’t touch Gibson intimately with the claw as he calls it. It’s almost like having the fingers blown off is a contagious condition he doesn’t want to inflict on the man’s privates.

“It’s a nice cock you have here,” Tommy muses without looking at him, balancing the bottleneck in his other incomplete hand with impressive precision. Not as impressive as getting the rhythm Gibson loses his mind over from the second or third try, though. 

“Makes me feel so good.” He slides the rough pad of his thumb across the head making Gibson’s knees jerk. “Do you even know when was the last time I felt good before you came along? Fucking 1939.”

Gibson hums in agreement. Sounds about right for him, too. 

He walks the tentative fingers up Tommy’s inner thigh, from the knee to the tender hole, still wet, just like he’s left it. He bumps the boy’s shoulder with his forehead to get his attention and juts his jaw forward at him in a silent inquiry. *Do you want to go again?*

Tommy slams the bottle down, takes his wrist, damaged fingers jumping a little as they curl around Gibson’s limb and brings the man’s palm to his mouth to lick across it generously, never breaking the rhythm. 

“Like this,” he whispers, guiding it back down to his own cock. “Let’s be realistic here.”

Gibson nods and starts moving, a slower echo of Tommy’s rapid strokes. Listening to his boy’s broken gasps colliding with his own as warmth fills his chest making his ribs burn from the inside, he feels like he’s stuck in a place he doesn’t deserve to be in.

“I love you,” he spells with his lips against Tommy’s shoulder when he makes his boy come first, makes him spill between his fingers and stain the sheets they don’t wash often enough. 

Tommy gasps but squeezes and strokes him right back, forcing him to follow. “You’re so French sometimes, I can’t fucking take it, I swear,” he slurs, breathless and glassy-eyed, as Gibson keeps kissing the words he’s dying to say into his skin. 

“Love you, too,” he adds, kissing the man’s forehead and turning away quickly. He’s either passed out immediately or pretends to be — Gibson doesn’t mind as he’s left alone to clean them both up and smile quietly into the darkness, all by himself. 

* * *

Gibson’s condition has certain benefits. He can’t yell himself awake when the nightmares come at the very least. Tommy is still up with him the second he jerks up, though, all attentive eyes and soft hands mapping the distance between them.

He cradles the older man against his chest as soon as he comes to it enough to let him and, again, he doesn’t ask.

They sit motionless for a while and after catching his breath, Gibson starts to untangle himself from Tommy’s arms, but the younger man cradles him into submission with the soft fingers in his hair. 

“Stay,” he whispers rocking with him slightly. And it can’t be comfortable on his leg, but god is the boy tough like a rusty nail - crooked and bent out of shape but so hard and stable in his stance. He'll deal.

So Gibson obeys burrowing his teary face into Tommy’s ribs, his heart beating so loudly right against his brow. 

“Used to sit like this with Alex a lot,” Tommy explains. “Tends to help.”

Tommy proceeds to tell him how Alex got his skull fractured, how the wound bled and bled and his vision would come and go, and when it would, he’d become frantic, panic and bleed harder. They’ve threatened to carry him outside and leave him in the snow to scream into the night at some point, so Tommy had to step in.

“Had to hold him together like this a bit. I obviously like holding you better, though. You smell nicer and all that.” He kisses the top of Gibson’s head and reaches for the cigarette lighting it while stroking the man’s hair still like some multi-handed deity running Gibson’s universe, making his sun rise and his clouds slide across the sky. 

Gibson tells him then, in a hushed tone you are to talk to a god, how he sees people getting shot in his dreams. For being too slow on their feet or too sharp with their tongue. For no reason at all sometimes. People he shares barracks with, young and old, new and someone he knows for years. How at the time he can’t even scream for them, he just opens his useless mouth until the corners of it crack and bleed, but no sound comes out. 

At the time it happens each of the scenes plays in front of him like he is underwater, blurry faces and muted sounds. But now, the longer he lives, the sharper the picture becomes. He remembers their faces and names, years too late.

“Do you ever dream of your family? Friends?” Tommy mumbles into his hair, nuzzling. The question he returns to from time to time, probing, checking. 

There are two men, the one who lived and drowned on the beach of Dunkirk and the one who was reborn and rebuilt by his own fragile resilience and Tommy’s gentle hands. He can feel Tommy pushing, guiding those men to meet again, to become one. 

Gibson shakes his head firmly. He doesn’t. Doesn’t deserve to because he's turned his back on them and run.

“Everybody ran,” Tommy shrugs, unimpressed with the declaration that always sounds so loud in Gibson’s head. “Do I need to remind you how we met?”

He shakes his head violently, no to both, sending his little hateful thoughts rattling against the skull, voice gone again.

Tommy curls and bends around him, gathering both of his palms carefully — he knows better than to grab him or make any abrupt moves in his peripheral vision now — and he rubs them, eight long fingers and a stump feather-light on his skin.

“Everybody ran,” he repeats slowly like Gibson is dense, letting the heavy words sink in. “The entire battalions dashing through the minefields and the barbwire like bloody cattle.” 

Their fingers slide against each other, warm against the cold. “Especially the fresh meat. You give them one good shelling, and they’ll race into the night bellowing for their mama. Good god.”

Tommy never says “mum” like he should, for whatever reason. And his “mama” always makes him sound nearly French warming Gibson’s heart. 

“Why didn’t you?” 

“Figured I was a dead man either way,” Tommy says simply. “When you’re thrown into the meat grinder a bit of fatalism can be good for you, don’t you find?”

“I thought I was dead,” Gibson nods. “Died and went to hell with the constant feeling of drowning as my punishment. Turns out, it was just pneumonia and the broken ribs.”

“Felt fucking Biblical, all of it,” Tommy agrees. “The monster with the teeth, and the claws, and the spikes.”

Gibson shudders. He’s spent years inside that monster getting digested so close to its heart still but so far away from the action. So it becomes an abstract concept for him, the war itself, the destruction. Making it scarier, turning it into a giant shadow looming. 

“Then, of course, you shoot through the bastards, and they scream, bleed and die just like you would,” Tommy adds. He still sounds amazed when he says it.

“Everybody ran from the monster,” he repeats and starts untangling himself, wincing. “Took me years to realize the bloody war had a human face all along.”

* * *

Their communication with Alex doesn’t go behind a handshake and a nod (when Gibson feels exceptionally talkative) for a first year or so. Tommy doesn’t burden Gibson with his friend’s presence when he can help it.

“Come on now, Thomas, don’t embarrass me in front of the French,” Alex huffs lowering Tommy down the wooden box they keep their shoes in. The man goes willingly like it’s a practiced routine they’ve been through countless times before. 

Alex kneels and starts working through the shoelaces of Tommy’s boot as they both snicker and snort like two schoolgirls on the playground, drunken gibberish, and hot brewery stench coming off them in waves. It reaches Gibson who shields himself with the newspaper he was reading when the door opened and feels fairly confident they don’t even know he’s here. 

“Stay on the sofa. It’s late,” Tommy says. 

Alex finishes the first boot and slaps Tommy’s other leg like he’s a circus horse to make him switch. 

“Yeah, and are you going to make the French sleep standing up?”

“Oh no, he’s sleeping with me,” Tommy slurs happily and Gibson winces behind the newspaper lowering it a bit to have Alex in his full view. 

He’s lived a sheltered life in a small nest they’ve built for themselves, but he knows what can happen to people like them in the outside world. If the outside world becomes aware of their existence and barges in, that is. 

Alex’s fingers falter just a little as they tread through the lacing, then resume their steady pace. There is a quick glance flying in Gibson’s direction but other than that nothing really shifts in the world around them. The clock keeps ticking and Tommy’s good leg keeps kicking an off-beat rhythm against the box he’s sitting on. 

“That’s… That’s good, Thomas,” Alex says evenly. “That you have someone to… look after you.”

He is done with the boot, and he carefully takes Tommy’s bad leg out. “I do wish you’d inform me sooner so I could fuck Lucille myself. I thought you fancied her.”

“Me?” Tommy blinks at him. Then bends nearly in two to lean in and whispers theatrically: “I’m afraid I’m into sausages, my friend.”

Gibson and Alex gasp in unison, staring, then Alex just slaps the hand across Tommy’s mouth. “You shut the fuck up and go to bed, for your mother’s sake. My God.” 

Tommy is still giggling when Alex hoists him up and when he drags him past Gibson, he says “I’m putting this to bed, and then you and I are having a drink. I have space for another pint in me. It’s time.”

* * * 

Gibson returns to the water years after the beach. It’s a dreamlike experience — because he falls asleep on the towel he’s been lying on with Tommy, shoulder to shoulder, sharing the cigarette and enjoying one of the last warm summer days in the town Tommy grew up in — and when he wakes up, his boy is gone. 

He jerks up to look around — the forest, the rocks that make the location so secluded, the damn lake he’s been dragged to *to cool off*. He sees him there, of course, he does. 

In a manifestation of every Gibson’s nightmare, the dark water swallows Tommy’s bare shoulders, splashing dangerously around his neck. He can’t look, can’t bear witnessing it taking him whole and his feet freeze to the ground, leaving him a helpless observer. 

Then Tommy turns, in a slow hypnotizing motion, and under a defining chatter of grasshoppers and birds, there is a quite audible “fuck” that follows. 

“Darling, it’s the deepest it is,” he quickly says, louder, and he straightens his back, rising above the water surface. 

It’s not helping. Gibson is aware his lips are moving, but no sound is coming out as Tommy starts walking up to him fighting the weight of the water. Then he stops abruptly and stretches his hand out. 

“Come here.” 

Gibson coughs on his unspoken words and shakes his head so hard his neck cracks. There is no way. No way he is getting near the dark element that will fill up his lungs to make them burst, crush his ribs and drag him down to the bed with no chance to see the sky ever again. 

Tommy has his other hand in front of him now, too. And the calmness of his voice, his eyes, mildly concerned but without a hint of fear in them hypnotize Gibson, make him take a few steps like a sacrificial animal to the slaughter. 

There is such a disconnect between the cold horrifying visions that fill his head, and the warm evening sun on his skin, the soft whispering of the trees around and Tommy’s face with the corners of his mouth upturned slightly. 

If he’d ever to die, he might as well do it looking at that precious face, held by the arms that beckon him. 

The water is cold around his ankles, and it’s creeping higher, a malicious alive substance it is. He doesn’t realize it’s because he’s moving and the water stays stagnant, barely a ripple seen on its surface, until it’s up to his waist and Tommy touches his shoulder lightly, trying not to spook him. 

“That’s good, right? Refreshing.”

“… the fuck it is,” Gibson coughs out, but when Tommy chuckles and hugs him, slowly, carefully, he lets him. 

Tommy’s body, bony, but hard, reliable just like his mind holds them both in place with the water whispering around, and Gibson’s aware that it’s him shaking uncontrollably is what makes it move. His teeth chatter, and he jumps when he feels Tommy’s hand on the back of his head, cupping some water and pouring it into his hair. 

He whimpers, drops his forehead to Tommy’s shoulder and stands completely still, just like the time does around them.

* * * 

He lets Tommy lie on his chest that night as they watch the full moon outside the window, hanging so big and so low as it only can when summer is ending. 

The younger man protests after a while and starts moving away, but Gibson hooks the leg around his waist to keep him in place.

“Stay,” he says. 

“That’s been enough stress for one day, no?” Tommy pushes up to take a good look at him, his skin tinted a strange shade of orange, glowing. 

Gibson stares back at the body above him, scarred and out of proportion, admiring how it has changed through the years to accommodate, to assist Tommy’s existence through the pain. How his arms have gained definition from dragging the weight of the body around and how his healthy leg has become harder, thicker from doing most of the work, how he’s been bent out of shape but remained unbroken. 

That body has remained a reliable vessel for the spirit, the force that followed Gibson to the depths of hell itself and returned him to life never asking for anything in return. 

Tommy takes his cock straddling him for the first time after they are done staring at each other with no words necessary. And they both gasp, in either horror or ecstasy — most likely, both — because there is a variety of angles Tommy’s leg will bend and the one sitting atop Gibson’s thighs is usually not one of them, not until tonight. 

“Oh my fucking God,” Tommy whimpers and Gibson echoes him, agreeing wholeheartedly as he pushes up in careful shallow thrusts, both hands keeping the younger man’s hips in place. 

Gibson still has enough sense in his head to notice when Tommy’s jaw tenses and his thighs start shaking as the discomfort catches up with him and to cradle his body and lower them both down until the softness of the bed swallows them both the way Tommy’s body swallows him.

Gibson can breathe then, as deeply as the ribs allow, and Tommy can tighten his thighs around his as hard as the bones let him. They become one, the air and the skin shared between them, and their kisses make up for what their bodies cannot fully achieve anymore, perfect and complete, each one of them. 

Their bellies stick together with sweat and the mess Tommy’s made, and Gibson pushes up to look into his boy’s eyes, the natural green saturated with the orange. Tommy blinks at him slowly, cat-like, and stares back like he knows exactly who the fuck Gibson is. With so many questions unanswered still, he has a picture in his head that is enough for him. 

Gibson likes this new man Tommy sees so clearly well enough to try and be that man.


End file.
